A Coalition of Giant Brands is About To Change How We Shop Forever, With a New Zero-Waste Platform (fastcompany.com) 160
In the not-too-distant future -- as soon as this spring, if you live in or near New York City or Paris -- you'll be able to buy ice cream or shampoo in a reusable container. When you're done eating a tub of Haagen-Dazs, you'll toss the sleek stainless steel package in your personal reuse bin instead of your trash can. Then it will be picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility so that it can be refilled with more ice cream for another customer. From a report:
Loop, a new zero-waste platform from a coalition of major consumer product companies, will launch its first pilots this year. "While recycling is critically important, it is not going to solve waste at the root cause," says Tom Szaky, CEO and cofounder of TerraCycle, a company that is known for recycling hard-to-recycle materials, and one of the partners behind the project. "We run what is today the world's largest supply chain on ocean plastic, collecting it and going into Unilever and Procter & Gamble products and so on," Szaky says. "But every day, more and more gets put in the ocean, so no matter how much we clean the ocean, we're never going to solve the problem. That's really where Loop emerged ... To us, the root cause of waste is not plastic, per se, it's using things once, and that's really what Loop tries to change as much as possible."
Is stainless steel better than cardboard here? (Score:5, Informative)
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost. The added weight (and thus higher emissions from transport) also needs to be taken into account.
Re:Is stainless steel better than cardboard here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there are products where the inner packaging / container can't be cardboard (some of them mentioned in the article).
There the reusable containers might make more sense (though I'd still like to see a comparison of environmental impact vs. more traditional approaches, such as reusable glass bottles).
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I recently bought Thai takeaway food - a massaman curry - that came in a recycled cardboard pottle with a plastic lining, which said on it that the plastic lining was made from plants not from oil.
It didn't indicate it was recyclable or compostable, though.
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half a gallon [wiktionary.org]
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When I was growing up, early on pretty much EVERYTHING beverage wise (cokes, etc) came in glass bottles.
These were all recyclable, I remember finding bottles laying around as a kid, we'd collect them and take them to the 7-11 or other type store and they'd pay us like $0.05/per bottle.
I guess that all went out the window when plastic bottles came into fashion.
But so much used to be in glass bottles, and frankly, I kinda liked
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though I'd still like to see a comparison of environmental impact
You can get a rough idea of the resources consumed by looking at the cost. If it is expensive, then it is either consuming a lot of resources or generating a lot of profit. I doubt it is the latter for reusable containers.
Is the cost of making, transporting, cleaning, inspecting, repairing, sterilizing, refilling, and redelivering these containers really a win for the environment? How many times do they have to be used to break-even, before they are dented, damaged, or thrown away by a Republican?
I am sk
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It's a service. If you break or throw away the container, they can charge you. Do you even think before you post these things?
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Stainless steel, and metals in general, are super easy to recycle and, even better, they're even easier to just clean and reuse.
New York pizza (Score:2)
New York-style pizza where the grease hasn't soaked into the cardboard?
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New York style pizza IS greasy cardboard.
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Nah. Cardboard is never that slimey.
Quite possibly yes (Score:2)
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
In a lot of cases yes. The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and you are supposed to do them in that order. Reusing is generally better than recycling. And just because you can recycle cardboard doesn't mean doing so is environmentally friendly. Any paper making (cardboard is essentially paper) is actually a pretty toxic and energy intensive process. If the stainless steel can see enough reuse cycles it easily could be a net improvement.
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost.
The paper recycling infrastructure is probably not as robust as y
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Cardboard is somewhat open ended... and while it can be recycled in many cases it is buried in landfills and doesn't decompose at the sa
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Ever tried to carry around a case of glass bottles? Even with nothing in them, they are heavy. Now, consider a truckload of them. The industry moved away from glass bottles, because not only was the collection, breakage and cleaning expensive, but toting them out to where the customer could get them was also expensive.
Once you consider the total life cycle, sometimes disposable is actually much cheaper.
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Recycling paper products is STUPID.
Yeah. I said it.
Paper is never made from old growth forest. A paper mill doesn't want your randomly sized tree trunks that the owls were homesteading. The want small, evenly sized pines from a tree farm. They don't want the processing headache of not having every trunk being nearly the exact same size, and the trees are farmed like corn.
The energy expended sending trucks around to pick up the "stuff" and then process it is significant.
A modern landfill is not a place t
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I recall a study comparing single-use and bring-your-own coffee cups. Apparently single-use was still cheaper if you included the cost of washing up.
Inconvenient truth #1: The cost of recycling is almost always greater than the cost of single-use.
Inconvenient truth #2: There is no shortage of landfill space in the U.S. You can give every person, every man, woman and child, a half acre of land, and 90% of the U.S. population would fit in Texas. Not that anyone would want to willingly live in Texas, but the point is, there is an enormous amount of open land. Use biodegradable materials and throw it into a landfill when you're done with it. Problem s
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In what world are road vehicle emissions (not car alone, obviously) a tiny problem? Obviously, CO2e from freight is a significant issue, and obviously heavy fuel oil produces really vile emissions that are airborne, but equally obviously cars, vans and trucks are continuously driving through population centres, and their emissions are themselves vile and cause all manner of respiratory disease, and the volume of traffic means CO2e is pretty high.
Have you got any actual data to back up your contention that c
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You're right. I am switching back to incandescent bulbs immediately. Because there's obviously a lot of virtue in using an additional 47W per bulb. In the winter I won't even have to run the furnace, either, so it's like WINNING. And I can't wait to go back to having to change the bulbs every 6-12 months in every single socket. At least all those extra bulbs in the garbage will be plain glass and metal!
You know the "3rd world" countries where these "lower emissions standards" are being outsourced to? They
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You use electric heaters, and then the electricity can come from anywhere.
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Because it’s inventors likely barely remember the 90s. They were too young.
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So in your head, P&G is run by millennials, is it? Right...
Been There, Done That (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorta like the returnable, refillable stubbies for beer that we used to have; right?
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And pop bottles, and milk, and, and, and, and, and. We still do this with beer bottles. Though hard liquor has in many cases moved to plastic as well, and they've tossed a deposit on them. Welcome to 70 years ago guys, where the future is yesterday and this was all done in the name of 'saving money' with telling everyone it was with consumer convenience.
The pop bottles were a fun one, my great aunt worked at a store that handled them exclusively. If you didn't wash them out,you got 5c/return. If you wash
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Glass bottle recycling in California at least, I don't know about elsewhere, was done away with by special interest money that was poured into politics in order to change the laws and decree that washing and sanitizing glass bottles for reuse was not safe.
Glass bottles (Score:5, Funny)
I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Now, get this... imagine if milk was also sold in glass bottles. And, in tune with the modern convenience of Amazon where things are delivered right to your door, the milk could be delivered right to your home. Here's the kicker... you could leave your empty milk bottles right at your door, so the delivery person could then pick up your empty bottles for reuse! Zero waste!
Re: Glass bottles (Score:3)
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Also I am not keen on paying a whole new industry to clean Stainless Steel containers when I could just take my own clean plastic tub to the shop and have it filled instead. I am not convinced that this "new" idea is going to work.
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It seems this is not about shops that you go to. Rather for delivery.
I guess the advantage of the platform is that it helps standardize the containers across companies (though I remember that glass bottles also tend to come in standardized sizes and shapes - the 1l juice bottles look all the same, the difference seems mostly in the label).
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Here in Canada there's a chain of stores called Bulk Barn(basically bulk goods, everything from honey to candied cherries, to milk duds, flour, cream of wheat, and corn flakes), they give you two options. You can use plastic containers/bags and pay for them in the store, or buy glass containers(which have to be checked by the cashier before filling to make sure they're clean), and not pay. They also calculate the empty weight of the container and give you a receipt which then is deducted off the cost of t
Nice...thanks for the info. Re: Glass bottles (Score:2)
http://www.bulkbarn.ca/Reusabl... [bulkbarn.ca]
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As long as someone from the shop with clean hands dispenses the product for you, I might consider it. Typically in the US it's bins that 'grazers' stick their hands in. And it's bad for dealing with food cross contamination.
They file no-trespass orders for that up here in Canadaland.
Re:Glass bottles (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. We could even call this hypothetical delivery person a 'milk man', maybe dress them all in white to denote their station. They could even service lonely housewives, for extra efficiency. I'll get on this, right away!
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They could even service lonely housewives, for extra efficiency.
That would make a great porn video. I wonder why nobody thought of it before?
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Something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Indeed. We could even call this hypothetical delivery person a 'milk man', maybe dress them all in white to denote their station. They could even service lonely housewives, for extra efficiency. I'll get on this, right away!
Make that a 'milk lady' and you've got yourself a deal!
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I'm the first one who likes the idea of recycling and reuse - My production of 'other' garbage is about three bags a year (40 liter of garbage each when closed, something like that?), one bag every three-four weeks of recyclable plastics and tins, one container of old paper every four-six months and concerning glass, many bottles I save to put my home brewed/self made beer/wine in. For the other glass, we have a system recycling over 80% of glass used.
However, before you use something heavy like glass, plea
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So, I see a better use case for stainless steel than for glass.
Stainless doesn't handle acidic contents well, so they either have to line it with plastic in which case we might as well just use plastic. If you do use a liner then it will eventually be damaged and you'll have to recycle the container. Or if you don't want to line them, you're going to need to use plastic or glass for acidic products anyway.
Glass and metal are both easier to recycle than plastic. Plastic takes less energy, but unless you start with clean plastic, you can only produce inferior plastic. Gl
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The truck that takes the beer from the brewery to the pub/supermarket can return to base empty.
Or it could take back last week's bottles, since it's going there anyway. It's not going to double the fuel consumption, not even close.
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You can have our friendly milkman deliver it right inside your kitchen even. No need to open the door.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Glass bottles (Score:5, Informative)
Why only glass? In Germany I pay a deposit on plastic bottles, as well as glass bottles.
And repurposeable too (Score:3)
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A fine idea but consumer expectations have changed since then, which is part of the problem. Remember when fruit used to be bruised and maybe a bit ripe at the supermarket? These days they discard all the cosmetically imperfect ones.
Consumers want convenient and high quality goods, so it's hard to convince them to take used bottles to a special location for recycling, or to clean and bring their own for refilling. Starbucks tried it, offering a discount if you brought your own mug, and most people ignored i
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milk is animal-based food, thus bad for environment sir (cattle farming emits so many CO2...) :P
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I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Which is exactly why I'm sceptical. We used to have a system of reusing bottles. We still pay the deposit. But the grocery stores no longer participate. You have to take your bottles and cans to local recycling centers which are inconveniently located and have awkward hours of operations. It isn't worth it so hardly anyone does it except for the homeless. If we can't get keep a depost-return program going for soda bottles, how is this going to work for pint size ice cream which isn't remotely as popular?
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I was sitting here laughing and enjoying your words when a creepy thought overcame me:
There are millions of "newer" people in this world who have never experienced soda or milk in glass bottles. Two entire generations don't have any idea about why the joke of the milkman might be their father has any validity.
In other words, it has occurred to me that the group of people who can understand WHY your words are sublime and humorous is getting more exclusive every year. *sigh*
TL;DR, soda and milk used to come i
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Modern plastic/cardboard packaging, is not the 'work of the devil' as the neoliberal filth of slashdot would have you believe, quoting their dark lord, Tony Blair. No- it is the industry BEST PRACTICES evolution for cost, weight, and hygiene.
That's the funny/ironic part.
Glass containers were eliminated solely out of greed, as a way to increase profits. But, as it turns out, single-use containers made of plastic or cardboard are superior in every respect -- cost, weight, and hygiene.
Now, the faux-environmentalist hipster douchebags want to eliminate what has been proven to work and go backwards, to the "good old days" of dirty, poorly sanitized, reusable containers.
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But, as it turns out, single-use containers made of plastic or cardboard are superior in every respect -- cost, weight, and hygiene.
Superior, except for that whole tedious environment thing. But that's somebody else's problem if you're affluent enough to own a computer and post on Slashdot, so fuck 'em, right?
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Incinerating the used-up, single use, pristine-before-filled packaging would be environmentally optimal solution, for as long as it is carbon neutral - i.e. for as long as original material, or energy for its synthesis, was not derived from underground fossil (hydro)carbon deposits.
Re: True story (Score:2)
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From the article: "The model is similar to milk deliveries in the early 20th century,".
Still getting the model to work for more products than just milk can make sense.
I am not fully convinced though. There are a few brands participating, but it is not something universal, and I feel this will only really take off if there is a certain critical mass. They claim "50-75% better for the environment than conventional alternatives", but I'd like to see the details (e.g. what they compared to - cardboard vs plasti
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Ban single use toilet paper! (Score:1)
Wipe your butt with someone elses butt
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Why use toilet paper at all? Many folks (e.g. the Turks) don't know about toilet paper - they use their left hand to clean up. That's also why the left hand is considered "dirty", and only the right one is used for handshaking.
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I hsve been in Turkey quite a few times and can assure you that toilet paper is commonly used. They don't flush it though because the sewer system can't handle it.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Just like (Score:2)
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go to a dairy farm and see what the milk holding tanks are... or the tanker truck that picks the milk up.....
stainless steel containers, what your milk was in before it got to you
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Just like how if you turn in an empty propane tank to exchange it for a filled one, and all the refurbished ones are garbage because they're rusty and leaky,
Nah. Only about 2/3 of them are like that. You exchange them until you get a good one, then get that one refilled thereafter.
'Course, you won't be able to do that with milk.
What about fragile goods? (Score:2)
What about bags and boxes of tortilla chips and cereals and the like that suffer damage in shipping and then again from the rough handling of store "placement specialists" who aggressively cram them into shelf spaces after playing football and hockey with them in the aisles? When I find a sixth of the product in unusable fragments at the bottom of package, repeatedly every single time, that is product waste. We're paying for that waste.
Adding new energy consuming steps (Score:2)
" picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility "
Pickup, delivery, cleaning and sterilization all require energy use.
Awesome (Score:2)
Rather than junkie cardboard boxes to store my extra crap in I'll now have a great selection of far more durable containers.
Yes! Bring back the 50s!
Seems Wasteful (Score:2)
The idea of using stainless steel containers for ice cream seems to be silly just for when you are handling the item. It's also going to let the heat at the ice cream as steel is a much better conductor than cardboard. Instead of having a separate pickup stream it would be easier to drop the containers into the recycling and divert them at the sorting centre.
As for the other items it seems very wasteful to be ordering these small things being delivered on their. It's be much better to partner up with the cu
Let me guess (Score:1)
The plan is to shove tons of ads down the throats of a captive audience?
That is the only plan companies have these days.
Yet Another Garbage Bin ... (Score:1)
Yet Another Garbage Bin to locate beside the other 47 different bins ...
Buy stock in anti-biotics reasearch companies (Score:1)
It's a pretty safe bet that keeping this stuff clean will be a problem. Oh, and aren't we supposed to conserve fresh water?
How will they handle damaged items? (Score:2)
So in this new utopia, the average re-use garbage can will have a few dozen stainless steel containers tossed into it. it'll get left at the street. A new special garbage truck will come by and dump the cans into the truck. Etc. etc.
So a lot of these things are going to get dented and dinged and otherwise marked up.
is the public ready to receive their jug of milk or pint of Ben and Jerry's in dented containers with worn labels? or will the containers all be unlabeled and instead we'll put them into plas
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That seems prohibitively expensive to me.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
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Never heard of China then?
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Clever response to Amazon (Score:2)
Aside from the pros/cons on the environmental aspect, I see this as a clever move by the branded manufacturers (think P&G, Unilever, Nestle, etc) to get the Amazon white-label crowd to come back into the brand fold. It's basically the same crap delivered to your door, so in order to differentiate from Amazon, they are using this environmental angle to get folks to pay a few bucks more. Not a terrible marketing plan, be interesting if they can make it work.
Food delivery in Korea has done this for decades (Score:2)
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They doom themselves from the start (Score:2)
They already stated the best case against their own idea. This quote:
"The goal isn’t as much to get you to change, it’s instead to create systems that don’t make you change–but have you then solve the issue in the process. Creating consumer change is phenomenally difficult. So the first question we asked in developing the model was why did disposability win? Why did it take over? I think it did because disposability is convenient and affordable."
But they need consumers to change - by
Where is most waste going into the ocean from? (Score:3)
They're launching this service in New York and Paris now? I'd think waste streams in the USA and France are relatively well controlled. My understanding is that most of the ocean plastic is going down the rivers in developing countries, or did I hear wrong?
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I suspect that this is for reasons of density rather than specific impact. There are enough people there that you can figure out whether or not the system really works at a decent scale, and if people find it truly convenient. Since they're partnering with UPS, that's also a place where a lot of deliveries are happening anyway, so they have the capacity to absorb those deliveries (and pickups).
I agree that a lot of the plastic problem seems to be happening in China (last I read), but we live a particularly
A Breakthrough? (Score:2)
I clearly remember doing something pretty similar to this in the 1950s and 1960s with refillable soda and beer bottles. (Well, it was my father buying the beer, not me...) So, the idea is not new. The only real loser in this will be the California state government, which collects a "CRV" deposit of 0.10 or 0.20 on nearly every drink bottle (not necessarily refillable ones) and then makes it impossible to ever get the deposit back. This will punch a hole in that scheme, but I am sure the CA legislature w
back to USSR (Score:1)
Round and round we go (Score:3)
We started here, a long time ago. I remember grocery-store drop-offs of reusable containers. Obviously glass bottles are the most obvious one.
We decided that disposable made a lot more sense. It wasn't just about hygiene.
Disposable packaging meant that there could be a lot less package of the "refills". You were always welcomed to use your own reusable containers. Buy ice cream "refills" in very little, very light, very disposable packaging.
If now the disposable packaging is already too much, that's a real problem. But the solution isn't to revert to heavy reusable containers being produced, transported, cleaned, shipped, damaged, and contaminated.
I don't want someone else's ice cream container. But I really don't want huge items of garbage in my bins either.
And do we really need to have this same discussion again? You're going to send a truck to my door, to collect my metal box, to transport it with fuel, to clean it with toxic chemicals and potable water. Toxic chemicals that were produced in a factory, potable water that's needed elsewhere, fuel from equally terrible places, all of which is better than a few grams of cardboard?
If you want to get rid of cardboard packaging without producing any waste, just wet it and throw it onto street. Heavy traffic will break it down in about ten minutes. Light traffic in a week. The forest in a few days.
The problem is as it always was. We produce waste that no one else eats. The fun of plastic. Paper was never the problem.
But we ditched plastic grocery-store bags with reusable nylon ones. Because somehow we forgot that paper bags were fine for almost everything. And we really forgot that the grocery store has a dumpster full of cardboard boxes to give away. And we completely ignored the ten little plastic bags of fruit and plastic-wrapped styrofoamed meats inside of the nylon bags.
Love making jobs. Just say so.
Not much use for the third world (Score:2)
I thought the main source of plastic in the Ocean was 3rd world countries and fast emerging consumer societies like Indonesia etc. Certainly the amount of refuse and muck on the beaches in Bali was an eye-opener compared to Australia which by and large has clean beaches and is careful with it's plastic refuse.
I can't see how any of this will work in those countries.
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That is one of the weirdest trolls I've ever seen on Slashdot, which really takes some doing. I can't imagine what your motivation would be, given Blair's now been out of power for more than a decade. I mean, it reads like you're some kind of Kipper, but if you're a Kipper or a gammon (but I repeat myself), shouldn't you be frothing about migrants and Brexit? Lots of people on the right and left get angry about Blair, but I think you're the first to get this angry about his plastics policy (if such a thing